EditMonday, March 24, 2003
Dumped
For those who don't know yet, Beth dumped me yesterday. It was kind of a shock since just the day before she was perkier than ever. But, I had gotten tired of her idiosyncracies anyway. I had even considered a pre-emptive break-up, but hey, can't violate causality at this point can, we?
So what did I do? I did what I always do when I'm upset- solved self-posed physics problems with Mathematicatm. I tried to model a unbalanced pin dropping with air resistance, and find the numerical solution to its motion. That part was easy, but modeling the bounce isn't as simple. See, I had watched how messed up the bouncing of items works in video games and figured it couldn't be that hard- just use a lower coefficient of restitution. But if you want to do it all with just one set of equations of motions and not have to jump between, it complicates things. My first thought was to have it act like the point contacting the ground hits a stiff spring/damper that's only active when said point is "in" the ground." For some reason, the energy-conserving spring makes it bounce higher than it starts! Back to the drawing board...
- Random unfinished thought- my next-door neighbor makes too much friggin' noise, and management doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. And now that you guys know I feel this way, it'll be impossible to get rid of her without making it look like a robbery. I mean... uh...
comment [4] :: Posted at 21:42 by blogger :: link
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Please, please don't get mad at me for not posting
So, I took a big hiatus. Sorry again. Yes, much has happened since I last posted here. But just for reference, I've posted more frequently, on average, than some bloggers. And do I have to remind you how hard hitting this site is? Do I really have to? Who exposed the modern flat-earth movement as morally bankrupt? Who speculated on the parallels between geoists and intellectual property theorists? Who denied the Holocaust? Me, me, and Nazi sympathizers.
Since last I posted, I went on two more dates with Elizabeth, and I'm not sure how well I'm doing. The dates went well, got a successful kiss in on the last one, but she always seems to be "busy" and this time said she'd "have to get back to me" regarding a park date, and didn't give me her home phone ## for Spring Beak (yes, Beak *peck peck*). However, she did have a big presentation about an hour and a half ago, so who knows? I hope to ask her on a double date tonight, so let's hope that works out. She really is a great girl, I'd hate to lose her.
Intellectual Junk
Am I at the stage where my random thoughts on various issues really are novel and thought-provoking, or am I still living in a childish haze? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I think I'm coming out of the youthful mindset as I reconsider many things that have happened to me throughout my life. But regardless, I have come up with ideas that I hope to form into essays, and I want to list them here, exclusively for my viewers, along with the basic structure of the argument.
Non-determinism in the universe
I originally hoped to make this into a free will argument, but even its lesser conclusion is fascinating. Determinism holds that, because same conditions produce same results, then whatever happens throughout all of time is determined solely by the initial conditions of the universe, and it's the only thing that can happen. But listen to this: Godel's (I know that should have an umlaut) Incompleteness Theorem, a well-established and solid result holds that any formal axiomatic system of sufficient complexity (can contain logic, arithmetic, and set theory) must be either inconsistent (contradictory) or incomplete (some statements in it have a truth value, but cannot be proven). However, the laws of physics, or more generally, the laws governing what happens in the world, given some intial condition, constitute such a system. The astounding conclusion is that either the laws of physics are contradictory OR they can't "prove" certain events. This means, respectively, that either a) there are contradictions in physics, which implies that some of them can be exploited to the point of violating Conservation of Energy, meaning we can get infinite energy in the universe or b) given some initial conditions, MORE than one result can come about. So, take your pick: either there's infinite energy or some aspects of the universe are not deterministic. Think think... (Let me remind viewers I'm not giving the full arguments here, just the overviews. But Stephen Hawking said similar things in a recent visit to my university.)
Geoists and interest
I've gone over my bit about geoists and IP here before, and I'm not going to do it again. But I also contend that geoists, who oppose profits from landholding, must logically also oppose making money through interest. This is because all money ultimately derives from a natural resource (gold, salt, silver) which is actually economic land. If you can't rent out real estate to make money, you shouldn't be able to do it with money either. Interestingly enough, this position is consistent with geoism in another way: zero-interest rates would make land have infinite value- which is bad, sure, but hell on earth for a geoist, meaning they want even more to take away profits from it.
A consistent language?
As you probably know, language is notoriously inconsistent. A boat is a small ship, and a ship is a large boat. Desire means to want; want means to desire. My conclusion on this one is the least developed, but I have to ask: if I were to construct a language that specifically avoided this problem by having a set of undefined root words, and the defined ones defined at their *most fundamental level*...
a) how many such words would I need (let's say i'm only trying to define concepts so I don't need to describe the physical world)?
b) would communication be any easier? Would concepts be easier to understand? Would ideologies be easier to compare?
For example, I would hope to define information as "a collection of relative certainties about a collection of truth and false values" and random as "having a relatively incompressible description using the most efficient information compression algorithm". Bulky, sure, but fundamental.
Keep in mind this is possible, at least in theory, as what I am doing does not violate the Incompleteness Theorem cited above- I specifically grant that such a language would be incomplete- I'd leave the most fundamental concepts undefined.
Comments on these ideas are very welcome.
comment [1] :: Posted at 22:09 by blogger :: link
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Rock Steady
Well, you all know I was worried about my date with Elizabeth, but it turned out great! She was really happy to see me, and really liked the gift I got her, a little stuffed kitten-sorta-thing. We had a long, non-boring chat at the coffee house, and best of all? Well, she originally said she would only have until 7:30?
She had 'till 8:10. O:-)
Oh, and remember how she was going to see her parents this weekend, precluding me from seeing her? Apparently, that's off too, so I'll get to have the infamous picnic date this Saturday. Rock steady. Rock steady.
Oh, and I don't care what you say: your theory of homesteading immensely effects your political philosphy- I'll post my notes on it after the speech.
comment [1] :: Posted at 20:25 by blogger :: link
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Where have I been?
Well, I've been in Reno at a competition Wednesday through Sunday. Oh, wait, that's my (soon to be girlfriend? who knows...) Elizabeth. So I didn't get to see her through Valentine's Day. AWWWW :-( But I talked to her on the phone yesterday (kinda slow conversation, but okay) and online today. We have a third date planned: coffee at Sweet Release's, er, I mean Sweet Eugene's. As many of you know, the third date is the critical nexus of dates. It's either grow or die- no stagnation here. So, I'll be consulting the usual suspects for advice- post any if you have any. The worst that can happen is the "just friends" spiel- so I hope I don't suffer that. But it looks like things are going well, so... who knows?
Markets and Rings
If there's one thing I've learned in all my life, it's this: markets respond very quickly, more so than you can imagine. If there's a demand for something, however obscure, there are many, many people out there, waiting to fill that niche- for a price.
Thursday I got a request from a romantic advisor: a friend of hers had her Aggie Ring messed up and needs it replaced: but A&M's knighted "official ring provider" lost her information- as governmental bureaucracies often do. So, they need me to find someone who can make her ring, and thanks to my fundamental insight above, I know it can be done. I should have done it earlier, but by tomorrow I'll be calling numbers from the phonebook to find some jeweler willing to do a "special job" at price below A&M's monopolistic one. And I know someone's willing.
The above is for educational purposes only.
More on Geoists Did I use that already?
Thursday I'll be giving a speech on homesteading for the AggieTM Libertarians. The flier will look something like this:
Homesteading... *yawn*... boring topic, right?
WRONG, dead wrong!
How you believe natural resources can be first owned, and forever owned, has an immense impact on your political philosphy. Thursday night, longtime member Silas Barta will give a riveting speech explaining the libertarian theory of homesteading in the context of geoism/Georgism, socialism, and constitutionalism, explaining the various methods each employ to justify them, and what the implications are of each. You'll never think of the phrase "This is *my* land!" the same way again!
Till next time, doodz!
comment [0] :: Posted at 23:29 by blogger :: link
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
It was a dirty day... dirty day
You're looking for explanations, I don't even understand/ If you need someone to blame, throw a rock in the air you'll hit someone guilty.
Sorry, just had to throw in some U2 lyrics there. But I do have some bad news to share. I finally built up the courage to ask Tina for her ##, but she said no. Shame, shame. Ah well. Elizabeth, if you're reading, yes, I do like you. A lot. But you simply have to understand, women are very capricious, and until we're really bf/gf, I have to live with the risk that you'll go bonkers and leave me at the worst time for the least obvious reason, as happened the last four, five times. But who's counting, eh? If you need someone to blame...
Aironut Client Utility
I haven't updated as often as I'd like to over the past weekend because my 100% reliable wireless internet connection from my apartment complex quit on us, and they STILL haven't gotten it fixed. Yeah, way to wait until a business day... and still not fix it. I haven't seen it so far today, so I'm typing this from a school computer, just like in asking for Tina's ##, to hedge my bets.
If I had been on, I'd have already told you about my lunch date with Elizabeth, which also went well. Except she said she had some extra time after lunch, but I couldn't think of anything to do. I'm kicking myself over how I could have taken her to the park. Regardless, she is going to a competition in Reno for which she'll have to leave tomorrow morning, so I won't be able to see her until Sunday. Yes, that means no Valentines for me an Elizabeth. Dirtier day. But at least I'll get to talk to her while she's there (probably).
The geoism-IP connection!
Sorry, I still haven't put my thoughts together on that, and don't know where, if other than here, such thoughts would be published. But I'll let you know. For now, I can offer this nugget: the connection lies in "If not for ____ , ____ would not exist."
comment [0] :: Posted at 17:42 by blogger :: link
Saturday, February 08, 2003
A non-psycho girl!
I'm happy to report that last night my date with Elizabeth went great. There was never a dull moment. I'm under the impression this will really develop into something. She already agreed to see me again on Monday for lunch. We met at Square One, then went to the movies, then for coffee. I called her already today. I'm glad I was able to meet a non-psycho girl, i.e., one who does not seem to like me, then flees at the first possible moment. (No, you don't have to like me to be a non-psycho girl, you simply have to act in a consistent- not even logical, just consistently illogical, perhaps- manner.) So things are looking up.
No deep philosophical analysis in this post, but I want to let you all know what the next one will be, since I haven't finished developing my thoughts into a coherent argument yet. I will attempt to show the parallels between belief in intellectual property rights (IP) and geoism/Georgism. For those who don't know, geoism is, in general, the belief that ownership of land is immoral unless you pay to the surrounding community the net cost to them of your ownership.
Silas gets in his school paper!!!
That's right, on Thursday I participated in a debate about the coming war on Iraq. See the online article here. Note that the argument attributed to me probably isn't my "strongest" since most people accept the legitimacy of taxation, even after my grandiose demostration during the debate, where I threatened a hot girl with death if she wouldn't give me her Aggiebuckstm. Probably my stronger, unquoted point, is that it's absolutely impossible, even in the strongest totalitarian state, to prevent a devoted soul from sneaking in a nuke, so the best we can hope for is to take away the desire to do so, as freer countries like Switzerland and Lichtenstein already do.
comment [0] :: Posted at 16:26 by blogger :: link
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
We get letters tm
It's very rare on this site that I directly and publicly answer the feedback I get, but this time I'll make an exception, since there was such a huge response to my last (as usual, hard-hitting) post.
First, thanks for noting the hard-hitting nature of the site, Mr. xcxx.
Second, I received a number of complaints slamming my possible connection with space program endeavors. A characteristic one came from my long-time vizierette Laurel:
Shouldn't NASA close in the first place? I mean, what's with the government-funded shuttles anyway? If this is your research topic, check my site for a TIME mag article on why shuttles are antiquated systems.
I thank Laurel for the link, and am reminded of an onion article, which, after a search of their archives, including through Googles cache feature, I still can't find. But I must emphasize that my research area is not NASA shuttles. The problem of closed loop system identification has a very large number of applications, including commercial flight (in which spotting a failure ahead of time would be nice unless you're the government and want to cover up disasters like TWA Flight 800) and process and robotic control.
And what about women?
I was just getting to that. There seems to be demand to know about my love life. Well, some of you only have yourselves to blame for not being online. But for the rest of you, I was able to track down a lovely lady named Elizabeth I met last November at a Bach concert. (See the hilarious satire article about it.) I didn't ask for her number unfortunately because I didn't expect to be in town this long. We corresponded by email for a short while, and I called her yesterday for a loooooong chat on the phone. Possible date this weekend, but she says she won't be here the weekend of Valentine's. Bummer.
I hope Elizabeth isn't reading this because I have to mention another very hot, very stacked girl that I like, Tina. Unfortunately I haven't been able to muster up the courage to say hi, but it looks like I'll have to if I want to have a date for Valentine's...
comment [0] :: Posted at 18:30 by blogger :: link
Sunday, February 02, 2003
Understanding Rights
Sorry I haven't posted much recently. But I'm sure you continue to check this site regularly for my powerful, thoughtful analysis of the topics of the day from a pure, ancap point of view.
I'm not the best right theorist, but some people make uneducated attacks on rights that really deserve to be corrected. They say rights are a mere "social/human construct." One friend asked me this weekend how it could be that rights "make society more efficient."
And my answer: that rights "increase efficiency" is not only true, it's trivially true. Imagine a typical society for a moment. There will always be conflicting desires, assuming they don't exist in the so-called Garden of Eden. Somebody will always want X, while someone else wants "not X." Viewing social interactions in this context, a right can simply be viewed as the statement "whenever [situation] the desire for X takes priority over not-X." Imagine, then, that I want to live, and you want me not to live (you want me to die, and want to do things to that end). Saying that I have the "right to life" is the equivalent of saying "In conflicts over on person's life, that person's desire to live ought to take priority over the desire of others for that person to die." Naturally, for a complete moral theory, you would need to add qualifiers.
True, it's not necessary for rights to exist. But since they are an easy way of sorting out desires, they avoid the tedium of having "start from scratch" deciding whose desires take priority in a situation. Thus, it's trivially true that rights enhance efficiency, since systematizing any conflict resolution (i.e., placing a hierarchy on what desires take priority over others) decreases the "entropy" of the area in which the conflicts take place, and thus increase efficiency. You could go without rights, then, if every conflict were resolved without reference to rights, but in a manner corresponding to the "usual" rights.
In fact, I don't think anyone really disagrees with the concept of rights, but rather, over their assignment. Even the most avid socialist, who would deny you the right to own a factory, still believe in rights: he believes that the desires of the factory workers to the outputs take priority over the factory owner's desire thereto. That is a statement of a right, regardless of whether said socialist deems it a "human construct" or not.
Thoughts on the Space Shuttle Crash
Just for the record, the crash was bad, like 9/11.
I recently realized that my research area is exactly what is intended to prevent such disasters. My advisor is having me reasearch "closed loop system identification," and the space shuttle is a closed loop system that needs to be constantly identified to forsee failure, to put it in the most succint way possible.
comment [0] :: Posted at 22:59 by blogger :: link
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
On Time Preference, Touchtone Terrorists, and the Process of DeSilasation
As intelligent and as upright as you probably think I am, I, like everyone else, have at least one vice: provoking others from behind a wall. When I was in fifth grade about, my friends and I made prank calls to 800 numbers like 1-800-22-Molly, the number of the Appletree customer comments line. I got off to these so hard that I could barely complete a call without laughing.
And then came the Internet.
Since I hadn't grown out of this phase, I took to chat rooms, especially those associated with zone.com. And I was indeed a bandit. Amoung the more tasteful things I did were:
- reveal what cards people had in their hands
- play in ladder rooms (in which you're supposed to be on the ladder before playing, else they don't get credit for their games) without being on the ladder, insulting everyone, and then announcing the news after the two-hour game
- prod a girl into thinking she deserved certain things to happen to her
- deny the Holocaust
- use names like WelfareLuvr, JewsRus, and TaxesRok
But that came to an abrupt halt when one time I ticked off the wrong person. I won't get into that (email me or IM me at JohnSharp9 if you really want to know). But suffice to say, it let up for a while, until I rediscovered mIRC, and later ran into a bit of trouble with my university.
But anyway, what does this have to do with the topic? Well, from watching Comedy Central's Crank Yankers and their featured group, the Touchtone Terrorists, I've found a way to enjoy irritating others without actually causing a marginal increase in the anonymous annoyance of others.
And about time preference? I'm getting to that, hold your horses. After listening to a lot of tracks of the Touchtone Terrorists that I found on Kazaa (and promptly erased in 24 hours) I noticed the following pattern:
(TT1, 2: Touchtone Terrorist member 1,2; C: Caller whose call they intercepted; note that one of the methods this group uses it to get people to mistakenly call them instead of calling others, and pretending to be a certain company)
TT1: Customer service, how can I help you?
C: Is this [company]?
TT1: Yes it is.
C: Well, [describes problem]
TT1: [Does something extremely offensive like swear at caller, vomit, act drunk]
C: Is this really [company]? Let me speak to a supervisor.
TT2: [fake supervisor] This is [], the supervisor, how can I help you?
C: Yes, I'm really upset at the people working there...
TT2: [you deserved it]
C: [swears] *hangs up*
What always strikes me in these calls is how quickly the people begin to ponder if this is really the company they were trying to call. Currently, standards of civility are such that antics like this stand out like a sore thumb. Now, they don't (always) hang up upon suspecting they're being played. However, at the rate we're going, rising time preferences and all, this rudeness won't make such a contrast with existing customer service... and the calls will get longer, and funnier. A silver lining, I guess.
Real Terrorists
They hate us for our freedom, right? Our free markets, etc? Well, Honk Kong and Shanghai have in fact, more freedom, which is of course, why Middle Eastern terrorists keep announcing:
Death to Hong Kong, death to Shanghai. I wish the Boxer Rebellion massacre actually happened.*
Keeping out of other nations' business will do a lot more for protecting Americans from terrorists than even the broadest police state. But then, that's not quite the goal, is it?
* parody of "Death to America, death to Israel, I wish the Holocaust actually happened
comment [0] :: Posted at 11:39 by Silas :: link
Monday, January 27, 2003
Some People Still Think the Earth Is Flat!!!!!!
Yes, as I was made painfully aware recently by my webmaster David. For a good list of links to sites about this BS go here, and for a good introductory article, the one David sent me, go here.
Oh my God!!!! Where to start, where to friggin' start! Can't anyone just take these guys on a ship or something? "Okay, we're going east... haven't fallen off the edge yet..." Can't someone say, according to your maps, which are distorted, the distance from here to here should be twice the distance from here to here. Let's measure it. Nope, you're wrong. These people have the audacity to claim that if the earth were round, the surface of an expanse of water would be curved.
IT IS CURVED, YOU RETARDS!
Watch any ship coming into port, you idiots.
What I find particularly dishonest is some geocentrist among them that say "Oh, the sun goes around the earth, but all the other planets go around the sun. You're wrong to say all the planets go around the sun." These morons don't realize they're saying the same thing as their "opponents." Speaking in terms of relative motion, the only kind that makes any sense, those statements are equivalent. You could even say everything "orbits" the earth if you choose the earth as your "fixed" frame of reference. However, the only meaningful statements are about those relative motions that are simple. Other planets "orbit" the earth in an extremely erratic manner. If you only want relative motions that are nice and elliptical, you have to say everything orbits the sun. But this does allow you to correctly say that everything else orbits the sun, and the sun orbits us ... but you're still a weasel.
At least we can all take solace in the fact that most of the links are dead: thankfully, flat earthers aren't finding any steady stream of revenue to promote their garbage.
comment [0] :: Posted at 00:24 by Silas :: link